HD 'Fragile Art'
by tigersilver
Summary: It's a fragile art, engineering happiness.


Giftie for **scford** and **magicallioness**! Drabbly sentimental goo, yes. Sorry:)

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It's a fragile art, engineering happiness.

It's particularly poignant when he runs into Hermione at the bakery 'round the corner from the Ministry at lunchtime. He's buying cream horns (the owner's daughter's Old School _and _trained in France besides; the things are divine, really); she's buying lemon poppy-seed iced bundt cakes and they're both secretively (not so) exchanging grins because it's ten minutes extra effort for whom it is they each love. Not that it's the same person, of course! By no means. Harry's very fond of Ron, really he is, but it's a blond supercilious prat who owns his heart.

Body, soul…time. A span of ten minutes in the midst of a mad, mad day. Everything, really.

He has trouble saying it. To be expected, of course. Words are easy to misinterpret. How can he say: 'I adore the way you're cantankerous in the mornings till I snog you and then how you complain bitterly of my breath?'

How, for that matter, is he to do more than he does already and feel alright with it? Too much and Draco snaps at him. Too little...well, best not to go there. So...he's scooping up the half-cross Kneazle-something kittens (Luna says she thinks the sire was a Nundu; every one of them's as large as a cottage and eats more than he and Draco combined and now there's three of them, tripping them up every five seconds) and dumping them (purring like Muggle motorcar motors) in Draco's lap of an evening in summer. And he makes absolutely certain he's never, ever late (by more than twenty minutes, that is) for a date.

He sucks him off, unasked, unexpectedly, just to see him blush. Draco blushing is a treat. Draco blushing and also furious as hell (_and _puffing scarlet-cheeked with it, poor sod) because they're running late in the mornings solely due to Harry's appetite for mattress mischief satisfies Harry's sense of 'what's right in the world' and his sense of want, both. Draco's knees giving way when he collapses back into bed speechless (look, Mum, no snark!) is cherry on cake.

It's making a soup (Harry despises cooking, on principle) when the wanker's been an idiot and gone out in the rain without so much as an Impervious, just because he likes the feel of it. It's always thinking of him first (there's only one him; there will always be-always _was_-only one Him), no matter how miserable Harry is attending the Wizarding opera. Draco likes opera. He likes art galleries, too. And of course Quidditch and back-country pubs.

In the evenings, late, when Draco's mostly asleep and Harry throws a heavy lax leg across him, trapping him upon the mattress, he can hear that one particular sort of sigh Draco sighs. It's peace. Draco (on some level) knows Harry's there; loves that he's there; needs him to be there, smothering them both with excess quilts and the stray scraps of rank scent clinging to his skin from the streaks of dried cum they both somehow missed with their hasty Scourgifys. And likely Nundu-Kneazle-_something _fur in the mix, as well, because all the great beasties have piled atop them, meanwhile, and it's quite the crush in their bed.

He does the same as Harry. Harry sees it, knows it, loves it. Little stupid things, like a new muffler that cost the earth when it's not even Christmas and weekly Sunday dinners at the Burrow, making conversation about petrol-engine parts and bits of Muggle microscopes with Arthur. And teasing Molly, and smiling at Ron...and bundling Harry up like the Michelin man of a winter's evening when they at last depart, two sheets tipsy on elderberry wine and stuffed to the gills with home cooking.

It's the long out-of-print volume Harry discovers under his pillow, all about his latest obsession, whatever that may be. This week hot air balloons, next week the origins of magic (oh, heigh-ho! But then he was Muggle once and now Draco never laughs, only sighs at him, silly man). It's the foolishly fuzzy golden slippers shaped like Snitches that turned up under his side of the bed of a frosty dawn. Mysteriously. And the twat who shrugged it off so nonchalantly and blamed it on the poor house elves, after.

Harry's grinning at Hermione this noon; she's smiling at him. They both blush carnation pink, as they're shy (yes, really) and this _is _special, this moment. It's love, thought out by degrees of exactitude and planned well in advance. Cream horns like the cement in a foundation structure, bundt cakes like flying buttresses to a monument.

A fragile art, this, the thinking. Thinking of Him. Thinking, thinking, thinking, and Harry wishes he'd a Map, but it's all right, really. Hermione doesn't either and he figures he must be on the right track, feeding the heart of the serpent via the stomach. Besides...

What Draco can do with cream horns has to be experienced to be believed.


End file.
